The GOP has resorted to another of its time tested ploys to
hammer President Obama. That's to tag him as a race baiter. The take-off point
for this old ploy was Obama's keynote address at the recent National Action Network
convention. Obama lambasted the GOP for doing everything legally and extra legally
it could to obstruct, damp down, and eviscerate minority voting. GOP controlled
legislatures have passed a legion of thinly disguised voter suppression laws in
more than a dozen states. There's also been a steady stream of voting rights
lawsuits, and court challenges.

Obama's repeated call and frontal
challenge to the GOP to back a minimum wage hike, extension of unemployment
insurance, and legislation to deal with the grossly unequal gender gap in pay
has further stoked the GOP's ire. The GOP ploy really kicked into high gear
when Attorney General Eric Holder had the temerity at the NAN convention to
call the GOP out on its blatant race baiting by bluntly demanding, " What president has ever had to deal with that kind of
treatment?" He meant the racial abuse from the GOP.

Holder as always was again instantly plopped on the hot
seat by GOP pundits, right wing bloggers, websites, and talk show hosts and
accused of racial polarizing. He didn't back away from his contention. Nor
should he have. But it wouldn't make much difference anyway.

Holder and Obama are African-Americans and there's rarely
been a moment during their tenures at the Justice Department and the White
House that they haven't been relentlessly reminded of that. But while Holder is
the convenient whipping boy for the racial table turn by the GOP, the target is
really Obama. The one time that he did gingerly venture into the minefield of a
racially charged local issue was his mild rebuke of the white officer that
cuffed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in 2009. The reaction was instant
and furious. Polls after his mild rebuke showed that a majority of whites
condemned Obama for backing Gates and, even more ominously, expressed big
doubts about his policies.

Obama relearned a bitter lesson. If you speak out on an
issue that involves race the backlash will be swift and brutal. And it will be
whipped into even greater manic fury by the GOP.

The ploy is used to rock Obama back on his heels and box
him into a tight racial corner. It's also a serviceable tact to try and put a
brake on Obama's efforts to fire up African-Americans and Hispanics to dash to
the polls in November. The GOP also has become hyper sensitive to the charge that
it is racially, narrow, insular and a borderline bigoted party. It made a loud,
but mostly empty effort to try to put a different PR face on the party when it
churned out dozens of pages of a blueprint plugging minority outreach. It has
even made a few noisy self-righteous and self-serving condemnations of nutty
rocker Ted Nugent's racist blathers against and about Obama and has tried to
put some rhetorical distance between itself and some of the more crackpot
statements by loose hinged GOP state legislators on blacks and Hispanics. But
that's more cover than anything to give credence to its pound of Obama for
allegedly shuffling the race card to divide Americans and retain and win more
seats for the Democrats in November.

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The GOP's racial ploy may loom even larger in the next
few months for two reasons. One is that Obama has shown no signs of backing
away from his take off the gloves assault on the GOP for voting rights
suppression. He has little choice. The mid-term elections are likely to be a
cliff hanger for some Democratic incumbents. Their victory will hinge in
getting as many blacks and Hispanics to the polls. The GOP historically has had
a built in advantage in off year presidential elections in that its core
supporters, older, rural and blue collar whites vote in greater percentages
than blacks and Hispanics in the past.

The other compelling reason is that the GOP banked on hammering
Red State Democrats up for Senate reelection with the guilt by association with
Obama in support of the Affordable Care Act. But polls now show greater
favorable support for the Act, and the fact that more than 12 million persons
signed up to date for coverage make this tact more problematic as a political deal maker for the GOP. If that's pushed
further to the back of the GOP's political table then it's back to an attempted
beat down of Obama with race.

The baiting and the assault on Obama will get even
uglier. But it won't change one hard fact. That's when it comes to race
baiting, the GOP will always have the market cornered on that--and millions know
it.

Earl Ofari
Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a frequent MSNBC
contributor. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly
co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the host
of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and
KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and political analyst. He has authored ten books; his articles are published in newspapers and magazines nationally in the United States. Three of his books have been published in other (more...)